a hitchhiker's guide to jesus

K

A Hitchhiker’s Guide

to JesusReading the Gospels

on the Ground

Bruce N. Fisk

Bruce N. Fisk, A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jesus: Reading the Gospels on the Ground, Baker Academic, a division of Baker Publishing Group, © 2011. Used by permission.

© 2011 by Bruce N. Fisk

Published by Baker Academica division of Baker Publishing GroupP.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287www.bakeracademic.com

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataFisk, Bruce N.

A hitchhiker’s guide to Jesus: reading the gospels on the ground/Bruce N. Fisk. p. cm.Includes bibliographical references.ISBN 978-0-8010-3606-4 (pbk.)1. Bible. N.T. Gospels—Criticism, interpretation, etc. I. Title.

BS2555.52.F57 2011 226 .06—dc22 2010051710

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations labeled NASB are from the New American Standard Bible®, copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations labeled NIV are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com

Scripture quotations labeled RSV are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

THE ANNALS OF IMPERIAL ROME by Tacitus, translated with an introduction by Michael Grant (Penguin Classics 1956, Sixth revised edition 1989). Copyright © Michael Grant Publications Ltd, 1956, 1959, 1971, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1989. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.

THE LETTERS OF THE YOUNGER PLINY translated with an introduction by Betty Radice (Penguin Classics 1963, Reprinted 1969). Copyright © Betty Radice, 1963, 1969. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.

Image on p. 14 from Ethan Landesman, 2010. Wikimedia Commons.

Images on pp. 233 and 254 (Il Santo Sepolero di Gerusalemme, vol. II, plate 4) from the Biblical Archaeology Society.

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 7 6 5 4 3 2 1


5

Contents

Author’s Preface 7 A Brief Word from Norm the Elder 11

1. Between Heaven and Earth 13 2. Ghosts at the River 37 3. Room at the Inn 75 4. Mist and Mystery 103 5. Time Imagined 151 6. Wall of Tears 185 7. This Side of the Tomb 229

Notes 269 Bibliography 279


Between Heaven and Earth

In which a German ghost

and a Roman aristocrat

inspire Norm to embark on a

dangerous quest.


14 • A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jesus

Anyone who doesn’t know how to fasten a seat belt is either an idiot or an alien. After sprinting for the gate and scrambling up the jetway, I was in no mood for the perky flight attendant. Even though Guilder had

warned that El Al security would take me aside, I was still annoyed when they emptied my pack, swiped each item for explosives, and made me drop my pants.

“Wine, beer, and cocktails are complimentary in first class.”The 32B on my boarding pass meant I was wedged into Economy with nei-

ther window nor aisle. In the window seat an underweight, olive-skinned kid in a yarmulke was nodding to his iPod. I decided he was returning home after year one at a boarding school. If he was returning to what he knew, I was venturing into what I didn’t. On the aisle a hefty, scented lady was letting her left elbow and carry-ons encroach into my space. A Christian, I surmised, on a ten-day packaged pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The fact that she and I shared the same faith made me uncomfortable. She retreated into a hardback—familiar author, new title—as the plane queued up for takeoff. Trapped. Sixteen hours between a rich pubescent introvert and someone’s suburban aunt.

I closed my eyes and replayed scenes from earlier in the day. There was my mother, teary, behind her Voyager on the departure ramp, compressing home baking into an already crammed pocket on my pack. Only a strong woman would


Between Heaven and Earth • 15

release her only son to pursue his questions, armed only with a care package and curiosity. “Don’t settle for easy answers,” she would say, the downbeat on easy. Cuisine and cheerleading notwithstand-ing, she understood that my questions were not hers. She had never studied religion in a university. She had never waded into modern biblical scholarship. Her faith world had scarcely changed since youth group back in the seventies. For Mom it made no sense to distinguish between the Jesus of the Gospels and the Jesus of his-tory. Text and event were two words for the same thing. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were God’s impartial secretaries—inspired coauthors of a single, seamless, harmonious account of Jesus’s life. Part of me envied her premodern, precritical world. Part of me longed to live there—back where every Bible story was taken at face value and where God’s every word had me specifically in mind. But Mom had never read Rudolph Bultmann.

Bultmann’s Specter

The day I sat down with Bultmann’s History of the Synoptic Tradition was like the day Neo took the red pill. It yanked me out of my comfortable ma-trix and thrust me into the harsh world of biblical criticism from which, it seemed, there could be no return. Bultmann was thoroughly skeptical of much of what the New Testament had to say about the Jesus of history. He could take a straightforward episode in, say, the Gospel of Mark, pin it down, and dissect it into bits—shared memories and embellishments, shaped by the dominant mythical worldview. The Gospels are, Bultmann would say, products of a devout imagination. They catch Christian storytellers in the act of preach-ing. They reveal little about Jesus but lots about Jesus’s followers and their faith.1

Unnerving stuff for a Sunday school graduate like me. Amazing thing is, Bultmann was more than an axe-wielding academic who thought Jesus’s corpse was still in the grave. He was also a devoted churchman who wanted to preserve the pure kernel of Christianity now that modernity had cast off the old husk of miracles, demons, and resurrections. If

“There is no historical-biographical

interest in the Gospels, and that

is why they have nothing to say about Jesus’ human personality,

his appearance and character, his

origin, education and development.

. . . The Gospels . . . do not tell of

a much admired human personality,

but of Jesus Christ, the Son of

God, the Lord of the Church, and do

so because they have grown out of

Christian worship and remain tied to it.”

Rudolf Bultmann, History of the Synoptic Tradition, 372–73



“I believe, in fact, that the historical

quest for Jesus is a necessary and

nonnegotiable aspect of Christian

discipleship and that we in our generation have a chance to be renewed in discipleship and mission

precisely by means of this quest. . . .

I long for the day when seminarians

will again take delight in the detailed

and fascinated study of the first

century. If that century was not

the moment when history reached its

great climax, the church is simply

wasting its time. . . . Do not be afraid

of the Quest. It may be part of the

means whereby the church in our

own day will be granted a new vision,

not just of Jesus, but of God.”

N. T. Wright, Challenge of Jesus, 14, 30–32

Bultmann galloped in to slay the dragon of mythology, it was so he could liberate the Christ of faith.2

These days many of Bultmann’s radical ideas look quaint—antique, even. Pure Bultmannians are an endangered species. Even his own students, sporting names like Ernst Käsemann and Günther Bornkamm, couldn’t tolerate his straight-faced dismissal of so many of the Gospels’ historical claims.

By the sixties everyone saw (finally) that when you stop questing for the “historical” Jesus, any number of nonhis-torical, malleable, Silly Putty Jesuses fill the void. That, according to my religion professor, Randall Guilder, was exactly what had happened in the years before World War II and why it was so easy for many Christians to tolerate Hitler’s anti-Semitism. Detach Jesus from his ancient Semitic roots,

Guilder said, and you can bend him any way you like. Aryan. Marxist. Republican. Democrat. Hippy. CEO. So the historical quest continues. Scholars continue to study evidence—coins, scrolls, inscriptions, traditions—where it turns up. And they con-

tinue to debate whether the Gospels wove historical “facts” together with theology, myth, and imagination, and if so, how.

Should any of this matter for those who read the Bible as scripture? My freshman encounter with the German giant encouraged me to trade youth-group hype for something more sustaining, but it wasn’t clear my faith would survive the transition. What if the only honest alternatives to naïveté were agnosticism and lifeless intellectualism? Could I be rigorously honest with the evidence and thoughtfully faithful to the tradition?

Two things happened in sophomore year. First, I discovered I was going through “theological pu-berty.” The diagnosis comes from another German, Helmut Thielicke, whose quaintly titled book A Little Exercise for Young Theologians describes the “theo-logical change of voice” that happens to people like me when they enter, for the first time, the world of biblical studies. Thielicke taught me that my theo-logical anxieties were normal growing pains, that I

should not presume to solve in a term paper problems

“Certainly faith cannot and should not be dependent on the change and uncertainty of historical research. To expect this of it would be presumptuous and foolish. But no one should despise the help of historical research to illumine the truth with which each of us should be concerned.”

Günther Bornkamm, Jesus of Nazareth, 9



that had baffled intellectual and spiritual giants for centuries, and that I shouldn’t take myself too seriously. He also taught me to keep still. As he put it, “during the period when the voice is changing we do not sing, and during this formative period in the life of the theological student he does not preach.”3 So now at least I had a name for what I was going through. And I knew I wasn’t alone.

The other thing that happened that year was that Bultmann’s ghost (lurking under my bed) was joined by a chorus of other phantoms, all German, all older, and all eager to discount the historical reliability of the Gospels. Particularly noisy was the quartet of Hermann Reimarus, David Strauss, Wilhelm Wrede, and Albert Schweitzer. Some questers saw themselves, like Bultmann, as rescue workers plucking authentic faith from the floodwaters of modernity. Others hoped to see Christianity drown. Reimarus’s answers were so radical they stayed secret until his body lay cold in its grave. Strauss’s got him fired. Was I foolish to follow in their steps? Was it safe to peer behind the curtain of tradition? The plane surged forward under full throttle. I felt myself getting heavier.

By junior year I began to realize that my historical quest had to include a literary one. I needed to know what kind of books the Gospels were. Did the evangelists fact-check their sources? Did they ever embellish the story to enhance the reputa-tion of their hero? I worried that if I posed these questions in church I’d feel like a traitor, an irreverent smart-ass. Mom must have said something because my pastor loaned me The Challenge of Jesus by N. T. Wright. Wright plants one foot in the academy and the other in the parish, and he is himself on a quest for Jesus. Like

Dead Germans on JesusH. S. Reimarus (d. 1768): Jesus was a revolutionary who expected God would help

him defeat the Romans. His disciples stole his body, invented the resurrection,

and turned his failure into a religion that promised life after death through a

suffering savior.

D. F. Strauss (d. 1874): Jesus stepped into the shoes of John the Baptist and only

gradually came to see himself as the Messiah. His supernatural birth, miracles,

resurrection, and ascension are myths—not frauds but “eternal truths” told by the

early Christians to unpack Jesus’s significance.

W. Wrede (d. 1906): We know very little about Jesus: he was a Galilean preacher who

died a victim of the system. Mark’s account (our earliest) of Jesus is largely pious

fiction, revealing more about the imaginations of the early Christians than about

the Jesus of history.

A. Schweitzer (d. 1965): Jesus was a misguided prophet who announced the end of

the world and tried to force God’s hand to bring it about. He failed tragically, but

his noble death remains an inspiration.



fellow academic Indiana Jones, he can’t pass up an adventure. Unlike Jones, Wright doesn’t like to work alone; he thinks everyone should mount a camel and join him.

If Wright is right, Jesus-questing isn’t for sissies. And it certainly isn’t just for scholars. Wright says he conducts his quest out of loyalty to Scripture. The goal is not to substitute his own reconstructed Jesus for the Jesus of the Gospels. On the contrary, he quests in order to read the Gospels more carefully and to notice details obscured by the haze of repetition and familiarity. In other words, he does so to avoid creating Jesus in his own image. I didn’t know what sort of Jesus I would find, but I resolved to take up Wright’s challenge.

Mom sensed my restlessness but wisely did not belittle what she did not under-stand. Instead, she offered to finance a graduation trip to the Holy Land. How can you be on a quest if you stay home? she asked. You’re like Thomas, she reasoned. You need to see things before you can believe.

Can I be used to help others find truthwhen I’m scared I’ll find proof . . . it’s a lie?

I’m a doubting Thomas.

Nickel Creek, “Doubting Thomas,” on Why Should the Fire Die?

That was months ago. Now, beside the van, she was crying and passing out zucchini bread. What I didn’t know at the time was that days before my departure she had received news that her cancer had returned after five years in remission. She knew I would have canceled my trip, so she kept the news to herself.

Beside Mom stood Jake, my roommate, shifting awkwardly and reminding me to track down his uncle Jesse in Israel. Behind both of them, hanging out the window, was Gimli, my border collie, listening eagerly for an invitation to come along.

Pliny’s Quest

Images of Gimli faded as the woman beside me shifted her weight. I drew from my pack one of the books that had made the final cut—a worn copy of The Letters of the Younger Pliny.4 I was drawn to the mail of this Roman aristocrat, perhaps because my prof said Pliny’s personal letters were our clearest window on the empire of his day. And because I admired a public figure who could thrive during turbulent times without becoming a tyrant. The back cover advertised his dates: 61 to 113 CE. A lad, I thought, when the apostle Paul met his death under Nero and when



Titus’s troops stormed the Jerusalem temple. Seventeen the day Mount Vesuvius erupted to bury nearby towns under thirty feet of ash. A teenager, perhaps, or twenty-something, when the Gospels were published.

Images of Vesuvius took me back to my sixth-grade vol-cano project. Each of us had to research a real volcano and build a working model. My best friend picked Mount St. Helens. I opted for Vesuvius, which was how I discovered Pliny the Elder, whose curiosity drew him toward the erup-tion and then killed him. I thumbed the index and turned to Pliny the Younger’s account of his uncle’s demise.

I remembered my Vesuvius oozed baking soda. Less dramatic than the original blast, but a successful home brew

nonetheless.

Volcano Recipe1 cup vinegarred or yellow food dye2 drops of dish soap2 tablespoons of baking sodaBuild volcano using flour & water paste around a tall

tin can or milk carton. Let dry. Combine vinegar, dye, and

soap in the container. Add baking soda to produce red lava.

“But it was not only each epoch that found its reflection in Jesus; each individual created Him in accordance with his own character. There is no historical task which so reveals a man’s true self as the writing of a Life of Jesus.”Albert Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, 4



The beverage cart was creeping toward me at lava pace. I resumed reading.

I pictured Pliny’s uncle, one hand on the tiller, taking notes with the other. How much of this story, I wondered, captured the “historical” Pliny and how much of it was poetic license, depicting how the author thought things “must have been” or how heroes “would have acted” under the circumstances? That prompted other questions: Were the Gospels any different? Could their stories boast an author as well connected to their champion as Pliny junior was to his? Pliny means to report what actually happened, and I was inclined to believe most of it, but his letter was also a eulogy—a narrative tribute to his fallen hero. His uncle’s eventual collapse, like Jesus’s crucifixion, was the story of one giving his life for many. Does admiration always lead to exaggeration? No beverage or mixed nuts yet, so I continued.

Pliny boldly comes ashore, exuding calm in the midst of chaos. Remarkably, he insists on going to the bath and having dinner.



At which point Pliny, like Jonah in the storm, decides to take a nap. Panicked pedestrians are baffled to hear his loud snoring.

Together they debated whether to stay or flee. Earthquakes were making it unsafe indoors, but outside you had to dodge falling pumice.

“Something to drink?” The flight attendant put Vesuvius on pause. The coffee was lukewarm. Across the aisle an older man matched the profile of Pliny’s uncle: stout, unconscious, and breathing heavily. Reading glasses askew, hair disheveled, his head was encased in a traveler’s pillow.



As I watched the aging Pliny peering bravely into ominous darkness, I felt a sudden impulse toward self-protection. Wasn’t my voyage almost as dangerous? His was a quest to get close to the source of a volcano in order to rescue friends from certain death. Mine was to get close to the sources of a religion and perhaps to rescue my own faith from the ashes of modernity. The analogy was weak, but somehow old Pliny’s expedition seemed less foolish now than when I was twelve. I pressed on to the end of the letter.

The final words caught my eye: “there is a great difference between a letter to a friend and history written for all to read.” How easy is it to draw a line between private opinion and public fact? Can history, even Gospel history, ever be more than somebody’s spin on the past? Neither my questions nor my seat offered much comfort.

Ex-Christians

“Whatcha readin’?” the hefty woman asked, her voice almost as perky as her hair.“This?” I glanced up. “Some letters written by Pliny, a Roman aristocrat.” My

tone was polite but maybe a bit intimidating. The line between serious student and naïve tourist ran down the middle of our armrest.

“Roman aristocrat? Hmmm. When was this?”“Pliny wrote between . . . um, around the turn of the second century.”“What does he write about?” she persisted. “Was he a Christian or a pagan?”“Definitely not a Christian,” I said. My hunch about her religious loyalties was

holding up. Her world divided neatly into insies and outsies. “Christians puzzled him,” I continued. “They made him nervous. There was no empirewide policy against Christianity so Pliny wrote the emperor for advice.”5

“I thought emperors only gave orders.” For an overweight, middle-aged, middle-class matron, you had to award her points for perseverance. I flipped to book 10, letter 96, where last term’s pencil markings littered the page. She gladly accepted my offer to read to her.



“Hasn’t Pliny heard of the separation of church and state?” she interrupted.“I think that was an American invention,” I quipped. “Religion in the Roman

Empire was always social and always political. People didn’t so much believe in gods; they just had gods. A good governor would welcome emperor-friendly religions and banish the rest. Pliny’s just doing his job.”

“Why was Pliny so hard on Christians?”

Those who attempt to distort our religion with strange rites you should abhor and punish, not merely for the sake of the gods, but such men by bringing in new divinities in place of the old, persuade many to adopt foreign practices, from which spring up conspiracies, factions and political clubs which are far from profitable to a monarchy. Do not therefore permit anyone to be an atheist or a sorcerer.6

“Hard to say. Christians seemed antisocial when they refused to worship the emperor and revere the state’s gods. What could be more threatening to an empire and more certain to provoke hostility? Maybe the main problem with Christians (and Jews) was that they promoted foreign ideas and strange practices and stub-bornly refused to give them up. Anything non-Roman was suspect.” I took her nod as permission to continue.



“So the problem was not so much what they believed, but how?” she broke in again.

She was sharper than I thought.“It was both, I think.” I repeated something Guilder often said about Rome’s

obsession with public order and its preference for political stability over indi-vidual rights. “Trajan took stubbornness seriously.7 He didn’t even let Pliny train firemen because he thought their meetings might turn political and become divisive!”8

She told me her husband hated union busters.

“Pliny wants to sound organized and level-headed,” I remarked. “He doesn’t want anyone to think he would condemn on false charges. If someone tried to dispatch an annoying neighbor by labeling him Christian, Pliny would let the ac-



cused defend himself. So he gets points for that. And the guy could walk if he’d say a prayer to the gods, nod toward the emperor—and curse Christ.”

“Some of these folks had followed Jesus for quite a while.”“And it seems like there were a few ex-Christians as well.”“Interesting that they reviled the name of Christ to prove their loyalty to Roman

gods. I guess it was one or the other.” Her mind was churning. “Reminds me of Saint Peter’s curse the night Jesus was arrested.”

“And interesting that they could prosecute someone who had stopped believ-ing decades earlier,” I added.

“What made them lose their faith, I wonder?” Her voice was suddenly earnest.“I don’t know. Peer pressure maybe. Or troubles at home. Or persecution. Or

perhaps some other cult offered a better deal.”9

I couldn’t read her quizzical expression.“Maybe a better question,” she offered slowly, “is why so many other people

remained loyal to Jesus even when their lives were on the line.”Why indeed? Why did Christians keep on believing, in far-flung places like north-

ern Turkey, eighty-plus years after Jesus had come and gone? What was it about Jesus that they found so compelling? Gentiles in Bithynia had no roots in Jewish tradition. No cultural reason to harbor an unwelcome, foreign religion. Yet cling to Jesus they did, many of them in the face of death. I looked out the window upon a sea of clouds.

“Please continue,” she said.She didn’t need an answer so I offered none.“Here’s the part that everyone likes to quote.”



“Is Pliny torturing Christians to find out what they believe?”“Yup. That was Rome’s way of making slaves tell the truth.”“But those slaves were women! Deaconesses in the church!”“I agree—this is nasty.”“What’s that part you underlined?”So she was reading over my shoulder.“My professor says this is the oldest outsider’s account of Christian worship,

which makes this part important. They gathered early on Sunday mornings to sing and worship Jesus, and then later to share a meal and celebrate the Eucharist. He says it lines up nicely with what we find in the New Testament.”10

My seatmate was disturbed that Pliny had managed to turn Christians into pagans. I thought of several high school friends who attended church for a few years and then gave it up. Mercifully, the woman left me with my thoughts. I pushed back and closed my eyes.

Matter of Faith

The smell of curried chicken brought me back to life. The kid beside me surfaced long enough to eat and pee. The woman, whose name was Dorothy, asked me how I knew so much about ancient Rome.

“I just finished my BA in Religion,” I said, peeling the lid off my juice. “I had to write a paper on Roman ideas about Christianity so I read Pliny junior and two other guys.”

“Why would you study Christianity in a university?” Dorothy asked.“My mom wonders the same thing.”



“I have a lot of faith. But I am also afraid a lot, and have no real certainty about anything. I remembered something Father Tom had told me—that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns. Faith also means reaching deeply within, for the sense one was born with, the sense, for example, to go for a walk.”Anne Lamott, Plan B, 256–57

“If you ask me,” she began.I hadn’t.“The Bible is a matter of faith. If we have the Spirit it

makes sense. If we don’t, it won’t.”My mouth was full so I had time to think. If the Bible

belongs anywhere, it is in church, not the academy. But that can’t mean that it belongs only in the heart, not the head. That a wall separates belief and inquiry. Or is there no room at the inn for Christian scholars?

During one of my darker periods—the summer after sophomore year—I discovered the work of Lesslie Newbigin. Newbigin contends that both fundamentalists and liberals have embraced the En-lightenment lie that we must hold out for certainty. It’s good to be confident about the things we’ve studied—the shape of the earth, say, or the facts of the past—but silly to hope for objectivity. Each of us views the world from somewhere, so all judgments are provisional. Newbigin said belief was foundational to doubt, not the other way round.

My reply to Dorothy was weak. Only time would tell, I said, whether my faith and studies would get along. I wanted to say more—that the unbelieving academy often asks great questions, and sometimes even provides the most persuasive answers. But I held back. Dorothy’s Bible soared above history in a rare atmo-sphere ideally suited for spirits and saints but too thin for earth-bound academics. Professor Guilder’s Bible, on the contrary, belonged far below, where air hung thick and fields were dusty. Somehow I flew between the two—riding the hermeneutical equivalent of a le(a)d zeppelin, eager to inhabit both worlds, re-luctant to choose between conviction and curiosity.

Notorious Depravity

“So who were the other two?”“Excuse me?”“Besides Pliny. You said you studied three Romans.” Even

though all that mattered was faith, Dorothy wanted to talk about history.



“Tacitus and Josephus.”“Who’re they?”“Let’s see. Tacitus was a senator during the reign of Domitian. Then, under

Trajan, he governed next door to Pliny. He’s mostly famous for writing up Roman history. Many would say he was the greatest Roman historian ever.”

More questions, now about whether Tacitus persecuted Christians like Pliny did. I didn’t know, but I told her that Tacitus despised nontraditional religions, including Christianity, for corrupting Roman morals.

“Have you heard of the Great Fire of Rome?” I asked.“Nero fiddled while Rome burned?”“Yeah, that fire. Nero didn’t fiddle—that’s a legend—but he was emperor

when the fire broke out, in July of 64. As Tacitus tells the story, Nero pinned the blame on the Christians.” I dove into my pack and produced another ratty Penguin classic. The cover read Tacitus: The Annals of Imperial Rome. I flipped open to book 15.37 and read aloud, this time from Tacitus’s description of Nero’s decline.

I paused and looked up. “You get the idea. The fire rages. Gangs start looting. Certain ones claim they’d been ordered to keep the fire going!”

“Ordered! By whom?”“By Nero. He didn’t even return to Rome until the fire threatened his man-

sion! To his credit, he organized relief efforts, let fire victims camp on his land,



and supplied the masses with cheap corn, but the word on the street was that he wanted to give the city a facelift.” I scanned the page. “Listen to this.”

“So he didn’t fiddle. He sang.”The man across the aisle—Professor Pliny—adjusted his weight, screwed up

his eyes in my direction, and promptly went back to sleep.“Tacitus provides a damage report,” I continued. “Ten of Rome’s fourteen

districts suffer in the blaze. Treasures go up in smoke along with shrines, temples, public buildings, shops, and countless ramshackle houses. When the smoke clears, Nero begins a massive building campaign: grander palace, wider streets, more stone, lower rooflines, better water supply. It’s an economic stimulus plan Roman style.”

“But why did he . . .”“Blame Christians for the fire? Two words: survival politics.”

(Taken from Ernst Troeltsch, 1865–1923.)

1. Methodological doubt: conclusions are always subject to revision;

historical inquiry only offers degrees of probability.

2. Analogy: events past and present are fundamentally similar;

nature’s laws have not changed since biblical times.

3. Correlation: all events are connected; no event escapes the

sequence of historical cause and effect.

Guilder’s Guiding Principles



“Notoriously depraved Christians?” Dorothy was not impressed. “It’s amazing how Rome could be open to so much superstition yet be so suspicious of the truth.”

“Actually, you’ve got it backward. The Romans hated superstition. They saw their religion as traditional, old-fashioned, and good for the Empire. Like oatmeal for breakfast. Christians, on the other hand, along with Jews, Celts, Germans, and Egyptians, were superstitious, irrational, and dangerous to society.”

It occurred to me that the first and the twenty-first centuries were not so dif-ferent. Several of my friends, including Jake, thought unchecked religion led to fanaticism and conflict. It was, they’d say, bad for society. They liked to point to Palestinian suicide bombers and Israeli settlers, to Iraqi Sunni and Shiite militants, to the 9/11 hijackers. And they would point to Christian leaders like the religious broadcaster who publicly recommended the assassination of Venezuela’s presi-dent. Or the cult leader from Oregon who swore that God told him to kill people. Tacitus and Pliny saw then what many see now: that unrestrained religious zeal gets people to do scary things. And religion’s revolutionary potential went well beyond overt rebellion and physical violence. Even the weakest citizen who won’t pledge primary allegiance to flag and country can be dangerous. I was about to press the point when Dorothy spoke.

“What did Nero do to the Christians?” she asked.“It isn’t pretty,” I said, and resumed reading.


a hitchhiker's guide to jesus

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